Running Out of Timeline

The other night, I got to try out a very simple little card game: Timeline. And I found it enjoyable... but with the caveat that it has an inherently limited shelf life.

Timeline is a deck of double-sided cards depicting inventions and discoveries throughout history. Everything from fire to black powder to the printing press to barbed wire fences to compact discs -- and everything in between -- is in there, in a deck of a couple hundred cards.

Each player is dealt a hand of five cards, which sit face-up on the table. In the center of the table is the timeline. Your turn is simple: choose one of your cards, and insert it into what you believe to be the correct position in the ever-growing timeline. Once you've made your choice, you flip the card over to reveal the actual correct date on the back. If you're right, the card remains in place, expanding the timeline and making things trickier for the player after you. If you're wrong, you have to discard your card and draw another to replace it. The first player to go out wins.

Some items are obscure. Others come one right on top of another, making precise placement tricky. But it's definitely interesting to play. Educational, obviously, but also fun enough.

But I think you can see the inherent problem here with liking the game too much. It's only a matter of time (ha!) before you memorize every card in the deck and know exactly where it should be placed. And then you don't have a game anymore. Unless, of course, you buy one or more of the multiple expansions available for the game. You could shuffle them all together for a massive draw deck and a much extended life of the game. (Though this won't be easy. They saved on costs by making the cards tiny, meaning they're also not easy to shuffle.) In any case, this is still one game you can't play too often, no matter how much you like it, because you're "wearing out" the game with each play.

I suppose this same problem exists for any game with a limited deck of "clue cards," a Taboo, Time's Up, Telestrations, or other game. (Hell, some of these games don't even start with the letter "T.") But the candle feels like it'll burn faster here. By the conclusion of two games, we'd seen at least half of the available cards we had. And while I'm not claiming all the players will have a perfect memory of what we saw, we're not amnesiacs either.

So, on the plus side -- it's simple to explain, and very quick to play. Perfect for those windows when your game group is waiting for more people to arrive. And perhaps if you use it only as a filler game like that, it will last a while.

I think you'll have to make your own call on this.